ACE inhibitors used to treat heart disease and high blood pressure may increase the risk of breast cancer recurrence, according to a new study.
Researchers from the University of California Los Angeles analyzed data from a prior study, conducted at Kaiser Permanente Northern California, which surveyed over 1,770 women who were diagnosed with early stage breast cancer. The researchers continued to follow up with the study participants for about eight years. Their findings show that the participants who were using ACE inhibitors were 56 percent more likely to see a recurrence in their breast cancer.
“The message from this paper is not to go out and stop these medications or necessarily change what somebody's using for treatment of their blood pressure," Dr. Patricia Ganz, lead author and director of cancer prevention and control research at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at University of California Los Angeles told MedPage Today. "The real issue is for women who wouldn't be taking these medications for one reason or another.”
The researchers also found that participants who were using a beta blocker, such as propanolol, were 14 percent less likely to see a recurrence in their breast cancer. “If we can test in the future the use of a drug like propranolol, which is very cheap, which may be well tolerated in low doses for women, it may actually prevent a recurrence of the cancer, if we can substantiate this research further in more studies with women actively undergoing treatment, as well as large epidemiologic studies," Ganz said.
The study was published in the Breast Cancer Research and Treatment journal and received funding from the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center Foundation, the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, and the U.S. National Cancer Institute.
